Intel s Successes with Formal Methods

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Clemence Robertson
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1 0 Intel s Successes with Formal Methods John Harrison Intel Corporation Software, Science & Society World Forestry Center, Portland OR December 5, 2003

2 1 Bugs in computer systems Most modern computer systems contain bugs. These can usually be coped with: Fixes in later versions Workarounds Documentation changes But the consequences can be more spectacular or even deadly. Ariane Therac machine

3 2 Floating-point bugs Even when not a matter of life and death, the financial consequences of a bug can be very serious: 1994 FDIV bug in the Intel Pentium processor: US $500 million. Today, new products are ramped much faster and a similar bug might be even more expensive. So Intel is especially interested in all techniques to reduce errors.

4 3 Complexity of designs At the same time, market pressures are leading to more and more complex designs where bugs are more likely. A 4-fold increase in bugs in Intel processor designs per generation. Approximately 8000 bugs introduced during design of the Pentium 4. Fortunately, pre-silicon detection rates are now very close to 100%. Just enough to tread water...

5 4 Limits of testing Bugs are usually detected by extensive testing, including pre-silicon simulation. Slow especially pre-silicon Too many possibilities to test them all For example: possible pairs of floating point numbers (possible inputs to an adder). Vastly higher number of possible states of a complex microarchitecture.

6 5 Formal verification Formal verification: mathematically prove the correctness of a design with respect to a mathematical formal specification. Actual requirements Formal specification Design model Actual system

7 6 Proof vs. experiment In principle, correctness of hardware or a program should be very much like a mathematical theorem. Yet: In mathematics it is normal to prove results rigorously, and experimental inductive testing is exotic and controversial. In computing, it is normal to establish results by empirical testing and proving them formally is exotic and controversial.

8 7 The value of proof Sometimes an enormous weight of empirical evidence can be misleading. π(n) n 0 du/ln(u) does not change sign for n 1010 The Pentium divider successfully ran billions of test cases and real applications Yet in both cases the natural inductive conclusion was wrong. Testing can miss things that would be revealed by a formal proof.

9 8 Formal verification in industry Formal verification is increasingly becoming standard practice in the hardware industry. Hardware is designed in a more modular way than most software. There is more scope for complete automation The potential consequences of a hardware error are greater Nevertheless, increasing interest in advanced static checkers like SLAM incorporating theorem proving.

10 9 Formal verification methods Many different methods are used in formal verification, mostly trading efficiency and automation against generality. Propositional tautology checking Symbolic simulation Symbolic trajectory evaluation Temporal logic model checking Decidable subsets of first order logic First order automated theorem proving Interactive theorem proving

11 10 Intel s formal verification work Intel uses formal verification quite extensively, e.g. Verification of Intel Pentium 4 floating-point unit with a mixture of STE and theorem proving Verification of bus protocols using pure temporal logic model checking Verification of microcode and software for many Intel Itanium floating-point operations, using pure theorem proving FV found many high-quality bugs in P4 and verified 20% of design FV is now standard practice in the floating-point domain

12 11 Our work Here we will focus on our work using pure theorem proving. We have formally verified correctness of various floating-point algorithms designed for the Intel Itanium architecture. Division Square root Transcendental functions (log, sin etc.)

13 12 Principia mathematical for the computer age? Several pioneers showed how all proofs in ordinary mathematics can be reduced to sequences of formulas in a precise formal system. Frege s Begriffsschrift Peano s Rivista di Matematica Russell and Whitehead s Principia Mathematica Unfortunately it s extremely painful doing so by hand. But with the aid of a computer, it s much more palatable, and mistakes unlikely.

14 13 Theorem provers There are several theorem provers that have been used for floating-point verification, some of it in industry: ACL2 (used at AMD) Coq HOL Light (used at Intel) PVS All these are powerful systems with somewhat different strengths and weaknesses.

15 14 HOL Light overview HOL Light is a member of the HOL family of provers, descended from Mike Gordon s original HOL system developed in the 80s. An LCF-style proof checker for classical higher-order logic built on top of (polymorphic) simply-typed λ-calculus. HOL Light is designed to have a simple and clean logical foundation. Versions written in CAML Light and Objective CAML.

16 15 Pushing the LCF approach to its limits The main features of the LCF approach to theorem proving are: Reduce all proofs to a small number of relatively simple primitive rules Use the programmability of the implementation/interaction language to make this practical Our work may represent the most extreme application of this philosophy. HOL Light s primitive rules are very simple. Some of the proofs expand to about 100 million primitive inferences and can take many hours to check. It is interesting to consider the scope of the LCF approach.

17 16 HOL Light primitive rules (1) t = t REFL Γ s = t t = u Γ s = u Γ s = t u = v Γ s(u) = t(v) TRANS MK COMB Γ s = t Γ (λx. s) = (λx. t) ABS (λx. t)x = t BETA

18 17 HOL Light primitive rules (2) {p} p ASSUME Γ p = q p Γ q EQ MP Γ p q (Γ {q}) ( {p}) p = q DEDUCT ANTISYM RULE

19 HOL Light primitive rules (3) Γ[x 1,...,x n ] p[x 1,...,x n ] Γ[t 1,...,t n ] p[t 1,...,t n ] INST Γ[α 1,...,α n ] p[α 1,...,α n ] Γ[γ 1,...,γ n ] p[γ 1,...,γ n ] INST TYPE Together with two definitional principles: for new constants equal to an existing term and new types in bijection with a nonempty set 18

20 19 Some of HOL Light s derived rules Simplifier for (conditional, contextual) rewriting. Tactic mechanism for mixed forward and backward proofs. Tautology checker. Automated theorem provers for pure logic, based on tableaux and model elimination. Tools for definition of (infinitary, mutually) inductive relations. Tools for definition of (mutually) recursive datatypes Linear arithmetic decision procedures over R, Z and N. Differentiator for real functions.

21 20 Breakdown to primitive inferences REAL_ARITH a <= x /\ b <= y /\ abs(x - y) < abs(x - a) /\ abs(x - y) < abs(x - b) /\ (b <= x ==> abs(x - a) <= abs(x - b)) /\ (a <= y ==> abs(y - b) <= abs(y - a)) ==> (a = b) ;; Takes 9.4 seconds (on my laptop) and generates primitive inferences.

22 21 Our HOL Light proofs The mathematics we formalize is mostly: Elementary number theory and real analysis Floating-point numbers, results about rounding etc. As part of the process, various special proof procedures for particular problems were programmed, e.g. Verifying solution set of some quadratic congruences Proving primality of particular numbers Proving bounds on rational approximations Verifying errors in polynomial approximations

23 22 LCF-style derived rules How can we take a standard algorithm and produce a corresponding LCF-style derived rule? Usually some mixture of the following: Mimic each step of the algorithm, producing a theorem at each stage. Example: implement rewriting as a conversion producing an equational theorem (x = 2 x + 3 = etc.) Produce some certificate and generate a formal proof in the checking process. Example: run some highly tuned first-order proof search and translate the proof eventually found. Second is also useful in connection with proof-carrying code.

24 23 Example: Difficult cases for reciprocals Some algorithms for floating-point division, a/b, can be optimized for the special case of reciprocals (a = 1). A direct analytic proof of the optimized algorithm is sometimes too hard because of the intricacies of rounding. However, an analytic proof works for all but the difficult cases. 1/x These are floating-point numbers whose reciprocal is very close to another one, or a midpoint, making them trickier to round correctly.

25 24 Mixed analytical-combinatorial proofs By finding a suitable set of diffifult cases, one can produce a proof by a mixture of analytical reasoning and explicit checking. Find the set of difficult cases S Prove the algorithm analytically for all x S Prove the algorithm by explicit case analysis for x S Quite similar to some standard proofs in mathematics, e.g. Bertrand s conjecture.

26 25 Finding difficult cases with factorization After scaling to eliminate the exponents, finding difficult cases reduces to a straightforward number-theoretic problem. A key component is producing the prime factorization of an integer and proving that the factors are indeed prime. In typical applications, the numbers can be bits long, so naive approaches based on testing all potential factors are infeasible. The primality prover is embedded in a HOL derived rule PRIME CONV that maps a numeral to a theorem asserting its primality or compositeness.

27 26 Certifying primality We generate a certificate of primality based on Pocklington s theorem: - 2 n (n - 1 = q * r) n q EXP 2 (a EXP (n - 1) == 1) (mod n) ( p. prime(p) p divides q coprime(a EXP ((n - 1) DIV p) - 1,n)) prime(n) The certificate is generated extra-logically, using the factorizations produced by PARI/GP. The certificate is then checked by formal proof, using the above theorem.

28 27 The value of formal verification The formal verifications we undertook had a number of beneficial consequences Uncovered several bugs Revealed ways that algorithms could be made more efficient Improved our confidence in the (original or final) algorithms Led to deeper theoretical understanding This experience seems quite common.

29 28 Conclusions Formal verification is increasingly important in the hardware industry Some applications require general theorem proving LCF-style systems like HOL Light allow us to program various symbolic algorithms as reductions to primitive inferences These systems are difficult to use even for a specialist, and need further development to become more widely applicable.

Formal Verification of Mathematical Algorithms

Formal Verification of Mathematical Algorithms 1 Formal Verification of Mathematical Algorithms John Harrison Intel Corporation The cost of bugs Formal verification Levels of verification HOL Light Formalizing